Peter Singer Blames Christianity for Speciesism

10 comments:

I doubt that other faiths or non faiths were anymore reverent toward other species. Just for the record the first Western Philosopher to support or advance the concept of animal rights was a Christian: Albert Schweitzer.

It's all so confusing! On the one hand, there is not such thing as right and wrong -- especially regarding where one sticks one's dick -- and on the other hand, all sorts of things no one ever heard of until five minutes ago are either forbidden or compulsory.

^ It seems that way, doesn't it? Who know that before Christianity, people were unlikely to favor the welfare of humans? Maybe he even means that before Christianity, people didn't even realize that there was such a thing as "the human race/species" (which is just a social construct, anyway).

"On the one hand, there is not such thing as right and wrong -- especially regarding where one sticks one's dick -- and on the other hand, all sorts of things no one ever heard of until five minutes ago are either forbidden or compulsory."

I'm no Freudian but it I have to wonder sometimes if he wasn't on to something considering the current obsession of conservative Christians with dicks and guns.:-(

Hal seems incapable of engaging with anything other than a strawman caricature of his own making. Witness his recent insistence that the Scriptures must be interpreted literally, or else not be read at all.

Hal, how about trying to listen to what others have to say, rather than putting your own ideas into others' heads? ("Oh, you're a Christian. Therefore, you have to think this way...")

If Singer wants to concede that on materialist atheism human life is no more valuable than a fruit fly's, he's welcome to. I'd agree, and add further that on materialist atheism, human life is no more valuable than anything at all, living or not, biological or not.

By the way, Singer's also taking -humanist- groups to task in that little diatribe. Perhaps that's a concession that secular humanism is just a distinctly Christian heresy, and a smelly one at that.

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I am the author of C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, published by Inter-Varsity Press. I received a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.